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Canada Post CEO Deepak Chopra is up for a spray of awards this year, possible winner of Best Director in Comedy (ongoing series, three decades and over) and Best in Shy, for directors/CEOs who are scared of the camera. The man sets records. He is like no other.

He will also win Best Delivery of a Line because no one else is nominated — such things he says! — and of course the sadly not-much-coveted Best Non-Delivery of a Line (postal category) because I could not resist.

“The seniors are telling me, ‘I want to be healthy. I want to be active in my life,’” Chopra said of the plan to make old people walk to banks of outdoor slots for their mail when home delivery ends. “They want to be living fuller lives.” He said that.

“We were so busy fixing the problem, but we forgot to tell people that we had a problem, too.” He said that as well. After days of hiding, he was talking to reporters about the Christmas postal debacle as if it were a treatable neurosis, as if Canada Post executives had spent the holidays in the fetal position on speakerphone with their therapist, Canadians being so insensitive.

If Chopra is saying he and his team were sitting in a room fretting about the withered limbs and dreary lives of Canadian seniors — remember, in brainstorming there are no bad ideas — and inspiration appeared, then I’m awestruck.

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If he’s covering up because the government wanted a quick budget chop and strongly suggested he go along with the gag, then I’m angry.

My mail did not arrive. And then it did, in bulk, the mail for houses further up the street dumped in the mailbox. As a mute statement of rage on the part of my mailman, it could scarcely have been bettered. We live on a hill, the hill was icy and he’d had it.

But the only decent response was for members of my household to gather the mail and walk up the hill and deliver it to neighbouring houses, which we did. But there’s one difference: we weren’t paid and the hill was just as icy for us as it was for the mailman insured for injury on the job.

And then the mail simply stopped, for everyone on the street. There was none for four days straight. Canada Post wouldn’t take calls on the complaint line number so difficult to extract from its hopeless website. And then, suddenly, it answered the phone.

The staffer was snippy. “You can complain and I’ll give you a number but they’ll just tear it up if you didn’t get mail for less than five days.”

But I get mail every day, I said, every single day.

“I don’t,” she said flatly. “You shouldn’t expect mail more often than every five days anyway.”

I spluttered, which is funny because you actually do sound like a basking frog tossed off its lily pad. “I get mail every day,” I said defensively.

“I get my bills online,” she said. “You should fix that.”

Worlds swirled in my head. But then you wouldn’t have a job, lady. But she doesn’t want her job. She hates her job, understood. But that’s the reason people are paid to do them.

I feel sorry for Chopra. It can’t be fun to share a name with what people, perhaps even his own family, refer to as “you know, the real Deepak Chopra,” the American New Age guru who is the king of affirmations in the nation of the dim.

Executive distance is plausible when you’re great at your job. Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the world’s best — and most terrifying — delivery service, is too busy for interviews. But Chopra II shoved the problem onto Doug Jones, senior vice-president of delivery and customer experience (actual title), when he should have grovelled personally and publicly.

As the real Deepak Chopra puts it, you “S — Stop what you are doing T — Take a one-minute breathing break O — Observe your bodily sensation and rate it from 1 to 5 P — Proceed with awareness.”

Chopra to Chopra, that spells STOP.

So I’ve onlined every bill I can. My payments for work in other countries have been direct-deposited to my bank (foreign companies insist on this) but I’m still waiting for Canadian payments. I’m reading magazines online only. You win, Canada Post. But in the end you lose and we lose too.

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